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Entering the Scrum

The heart-lifting spectacle of South Africa’s first free election in April 1994 was, for Nelson Mandela and his followers, a triumph unimaginably sweet, but perilously incomplete. Mandela was keenly aware that his party’s victory, secured by a landslide of black votes, lacked the endorsement of alienated whites, and that whites retained sufficient wealth and weaponry to endanger his new democracy if they felt threatened. As John Carlin puts it in “Playing the Enemy,” paraphrasing Garibaldi on the birth of Italy, the election had created a new South Africa; now Mandela’s task was to create South Africans. This wonderful book describes Mandela’s methodical, improbable and brilliant campaign to reconcile resentful blacks and fearful whites around a sporting event, a game of rugby.

That South Africa’s first patch of common ground might be a rugby field was preposterous on the face of it. Rugby was the secular religion of the Afrikaners, the white tribe that invented and enforced apartheid. It was a sport that most blacks considered — if they considered it at all — “the brutish, alien pastime of a brutish, alien people.”

The anti-apartheid movement had fought passionately for a world boycott of South Africa’s team, the Springboks, knowing that this, as much as economic sanctions and domestic unrest, would drive home to ordinary Afrikaners that their dominion was untenable. Now, in an attempt to reassure the defeated minority that they had a rightful place in the new order, Mandela agreed to host the 1995 rugby World Cup games in South Africa. More than that, he set out to transform black South Africans into Springbok enthusiasts by lending his personal charisma to the loathed sport and by mobilizing all races in pursuit of a world championship.

A caveat is required: the premise that a single rugby game, even a championship game, could heal three centuries of racial division, dispelling accumulated terrors and hatreds in a magic Mandela moment, is romantic overstatement. South Africa is still a generation or two from racial reconciliation. But Carlin summons many witnesses, from ardent liberation firebrands to white racist bitter-enders, who testify that the 1995 championship match was a profoundly formative moment in the young country’s move away from the threat of civil war. By the time Carlin is finished, you’ll be inclined to grant him his poetic license.

Carlin is a Briton who reported on South Africa’s transition for The Independent of London. (We were amiable colleagues at the time.) Now a globe-trotting writer for the world’s leading Spanish daily, El País, he is an industrious reporter and gifted storyteller.

Photo

President Nelson Mandela and François Pienaar, captain of the South Africa Springboks, at the Rugby World Cup in Johannesburg, 1995.Credit
Reuters

“Playing the Enemy” begins on the morning of the fateful game, in which the South Africans were underdogs against the gargantuan New Zealand All Blacks (so named for their uniforms). Carlin introduces an assortment of characters, some familiar, some obscure, victims and villains of apartheid, all of whom would feel themselves and their country transformed by the day’s end. We meet François Pienaar, the Springboks’ captain, a 6-foot-4 model of Afrikaner manhood who “carried his 240 pounds of muscle with the statuesque ease of Michelangelo’s David,” and Linga Moonsamy, a former ­anti-apartheid guerrilla who would be Mandela’s No. 1 bodyguard that day. We meet Niel Barnard, the former head of the sinister apartheid-era intelligence service, and Justice Bekebeke, who had spent much of his young life on death row for killing a policeman. We meet the irrepressible Anglican archbishop and Nobel Prize winner Desmond Tutu, stranded in San Francisco and looking for a bar that might broadcast the rugby game, and Constand Viljoen, the retired head of the South African Defense Force who became the leader of a white separatist resistance front. These and other deftly sketched characters make up both an audience for the big game and a gallery of South Africa, through which Carlin will recount the absorbing story of a country emerging from its cruelly absurd racist experiment.

After that overture, the book steps back to its real beginning, in 1985. That was the year Nelson Mandela, then 21 years into a life sentence for conspiring to overthrow the regime, made his overture to the white government, beginning the long negotiation that would ultimately turn South Africa right side up. That was also the year activists scuttled a planned All Black tour of South Africa — which, along with riots in black townships and a rising chorus of international opprobrium, helped convince realists in the white government that they needed Mandela as much as he needed them. As the narrative steams forward, taking on interesting passengers and traversing some tumultuous history, the game of rugby becomes a recurring symbol. Carlin, who has worked in America and knows that rugby scarcely registers here, goes easy on rules and jargon while managing to evoke the drama of the game — “like a giant chess match played at speed, with great violence,” as he puts it.

There are scenes that will open your tear ducts, like the chapter in which the muscle-­bound Springboks — “Hollywood central casting’s overenthusiastic response to a request for 26 Roman gladiators” — set out to learn how to sing “Nkosi Sikelele iAfrika,” the thrilling Xhosa-­language liberation hymn that became one of South Africa’s two national anthems. Or when, on the morning of the climactic match, the rugby captain leads his men from their hotel for a warm-up jog, and four black children selling newspapers recognize them and call out to them by name — adoring fans from the other side of history. Or when the uniformly white crowd greets Mandela with a rapturous chorus: “Nel-son! Nel-son! Nel-son!”

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This is, of course, Mandela’s book. Carlin portrays him as the master politician he was, a man who manipulated allies and adversaries alike with the charming calculation of a benign Machiavelli. It is a close call which was the bigger challenge: standing up to the more vengeful impulses of his own movement or winning over the fearful white minority. But he essentially restrained his side by defanging the other side. Having read their history and studied their sport, he astonished the Afrikaners by addressing them in their language (learned in prison), but mostly by not hating them. “You don’t address their brains,” he advised his comrades, speaking of the Afrikaners. “You address their hearts.”

Mandela was, Carlin demonstrates, “a canny strategist, a talented manipulator of mass sentiment. His gift for political theater was as sophisticated as Bill Clinton’s or Ronald Reagan’s.” If “Playing the Enemy” were not so well written, it would deserve a place among the management tomes and self-help books that dominate business best-seller lists — a guide to leadership that plays to people’s better angels.

Carlin has already sold film rights to Morgan Freeman, who seems born to play Nelson Mandela. Matt Damon is signed up to play the Springbok captain, and Clint Eastwood (a rugby fan) is directing. In those hands, there’s a chance the movie will do justice to the story.

But don’t wait for the movie.

PLAYING THE ENEMY

Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation

By John Carlin

Illustrated. 274 pp. The Penguin Press. $24.95

Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, was the paper’s Johannesburg bureau chief from 1992 to 1995 and is the author of the children’s book “Tree Shaker: The Story of Nelson Mandela.”

A version of this review appears in print on , on Page BR9 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Entering the Scrum. Today's Paper|Subscribe